TOA ORCS BLOOD BOWL SERIAL
TOA ORCS BLOOD BOWL MANUAL

You clean them up, removing the excess plastic that your clumsy hands left on the models. Then you clip out the other miniatures and tools – the balls, the coins, the fists (fists?), and the scatter, throw-in and range tools.

TOA ORCS BLOOD BOWL SERIAL

Be careful when you do this too – the elasticity of the plastic means that you’ll often end up cutting a connector only to find an orc head shooting off into the air like you’re the antagonist in some grisly fantasy serial killing. How many figures? Twenty two, each in three parts. Then you take your exacto knife…you don’t have one of them either? What’s wrong with you? Then you snip all those figures out of the sprues. You can use scissors I suppose, if you’re some kind of disgusting animal. But still – when I opened up Descent for the first time I wasn’t greeted with a todo list and a small dinosaur carcass worth of wasted plastic.Īnyway, you take your fine detail clippers… wait, you don’t have those? Oh dear – you’ll need them or something very like them. The models they give you here aren’t complex – three parts that will, with experimentation and a fair degree of frustration, eventually slot together in place. I understand that this is all ‘part of the experience’ that goes along with Games Workshop products –that the painstaking assembly of miniatures is, in itself, a satisfying diversion.

TOA ORCS BLOOD BOWL MANUAL

The manual comes not only with (borderline useless) assembly information but with a guide to painting each model in the correct GW approved colours. Everything about the Blood Bowl box, from its form-factor to its plastic sprues of miniatures you need to assemble yourself – feels antiquated. That may sound overly romanticised, but really that’s my snarky way of say ‘My God, Games Workshop seems to have no idea that the eighties are over’. It was like a flashback to an earlier time of simpler games and expectations. It smelt like the eighties on a cold, Scottish December morning. When you open it, it literally smells like Christmas – like that copy of Hero Quest I owned as a young lad. When you take hold of this box, it feels like you’re holding on to a piece of history.

Sure, the rules were never difficult to find and all kinds of companies were making all kinds of compatible miniatures without the blessing of Games Workshop – but that’s not the same, y’know? This is a game that has carries the weight of expectation because for many years it’s been out of print and available only on the second hand market. I was excited when the box made its way into my clammy, expectant hands. When was the last time a game moved you to verse? This is a big release for me. I have even written EPIC POETRY about Blood Bowl, which I have published on THIS VERY BLOG. I lost a weekend to the new campaign I started. When I heard that the new edition of the tabletop game was being released, I reinstalled the Legendary edition of the game to remind myself how it played. And I’ve played every single variation to death. Until now, it’s been entirely through the slip-shod Cyanide video game adaptation – thanks to an especially insistent friend I have bought that buggy mess four times now, in four ever so slightly different variations. I’ve played a lot of Blood Bowl over the years. This box is big enough to bury your dreams.

Toa orcs blood bowl